As a jungle main, I must disagree with many people that say don't learn jungle right now. I only saw one below, but I'm sure there are many that agree with him. Or her. There is no guarantee that riot will make jungling easier in subsequent patches, and if you can't play a given role, no matter how easy you can carry, no matter how good of a support mid top and marksman you are, if you can't jungle you're still not good at league of legends. To address your points in order:
- Smite buffs.
Smiting the large monster of a camp will give you buffs in this jungle, and it applies AS SOON AS YOU SMITE. Meaning when you smite gromp, even if it doesn't die, you still get the buff to help you clear that camp. This is why many people start with gromp, as it gives you a useful buff for clearing camps, toadstool armor (which gives a poison DoT to anything that damages you). Smiting red and blue give you health and mana respectively for smiting them, a nice chunk for if you need some sustain while clearing. The wolves give you a ward that will follow enemies that enter that side of the jungle, which you use... not very often. Usually in early-mid game when you don't want to buy wards, but there is a threat of them taking your blue. The wraiths have a ward clear for their buff; it's good for if you want to blind-side someone or destroy some stealth wards. If a ward detects you, then you get true sight for a short time, long enough to destroy wards, certainly. It can also find pink wards in bushes, which is neat. The last buff from golems is gift of the heavy hands, which has fallen out of favor. It's been nerfed a lot; it used to be the first camp every time. It gives your auto attacks a stun every... 3 or 5 AA's, I can't remember; I honestly never bother with it now. It can't affect champions, so it doesn't help gank, and that champions I pick don't need help clearing with it. Even if you do need help clearing, trailblazer's tomahawk gives you blasting smite, which is better anyway.
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Honestly, the route doesn't matter a ton at lower elos, as long as you're mobile enough to get where you need to be to gank. Most of the time I make my own path. It sounds like you're going to stick with traditional junglers where camp clear should be pretty easy, so until you get higher elo don't worry so much about it.
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Builds are highly subjective, and I can't give you a build like that for any given champ that you can just drag and drop. If you were to jungle Amumu, then that build would be very far from optimal; you would probably want lots of damage items that also give you health and armor, such as Rylai's, liandry's, or zhonya's. For Vi, lots of armor and health; one of her best roles as a jungler is armor breaker. Once your Denting Blows wrecks the enemy tank's armor, he's pretty weak for the AD to destroy. This also goes for any other character that builds armor.
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Again, depends on the champion. Junlers with CC most certainly work that way. If you can, try to feed kills to the carry; they do way more damage when they get their items, and they're called "the carry" for a reason. Junglers like Master Yi just do tons of damage while being real slippery so he doesn't get killed; assassin junglers are meant to catch people out, go HAM, so to speak, and just destroy them. It is a bit more risky, as junlgers are usually under-leveled. Remember, jungling doesn't level you up as fast as cs'ing (usually). If you play a really aggressive ADC, then I recommend giving Yi a try; you just build straight damage and if you get on a roll, you should snowball just like most normal carries.
Like I said in 4, you should find a jungler that works for your playstyle. If Vi doesn't match with your playstyle, then you might want to try other junglers. I personally love to jungle Sion. Since 3 of his skills are CC, and his camp clear is easily sub-30 seconds, I get chilling smite for a ton of cc. As long as your lane is aware and you have good timing and positioning, you can do easy ganks and get easy dragons, especially early on. But that's my style, going in, laying down cc, and hopefully get the carry fed. You may very well do better as master yi, who I'm terrible with because he doesn't match my playstyle. can do it, it's just.... not as good.
Also, another point of advice. With smite having two charges that you can save up, it's a great idea to learn how to manage your smite, and it may be worth playing a few bot games to experiment with routes and use of smite. Don't give up on the jungle; you can become a good jungler, even if the thing is a bit rough right now. Oh, and don't be afraid to smite red first time around to give you enough hp to gank after; I do that all the time, and it works pretty well.